They remember Target ’90, the goals-setting project that then-Mayor Henry Cisneros launched in May 1983 and lasted until 1989.

Housing, transportation, utilities, education, the arts and other categories all are back as issues waiting for committees. The views about the Target ’90 results may differ, but city leaders agree it’s time for another citywide goal-setting process.

Hundreds of people already are jockeying for position to promote their agendas in Castro’s SA2020 project.

San Antonio is a far different city than it was when Target ’90 planning started 27 years ago. One of the reasons is because of Target ’90 itself, which started the conversations that led to the Alamodome, a downtown University of Texas at San Antonio campus and a biosciences research park, among other developments.

Target ’90 also fused a leadership group that endured, a byproduct Castro hopes to replicate with SA2020.

San Antonio resident and General Motors Co. Chairman Ed Whitacre will kick off SA2020 this Saturday at the TriPoint YMCA at 3233 N. St. Mary’s St.

Whitacre will speak on the importance of community-based urban planning. Everyone who attends will have a chance to join working groups that will write a decadelong roadmap for San Antonio over the next six months.

JCCI of Jacksonville, Fla., selected by the city to facilitate SA2020, is aiming for at least 750 to 800 people to attend the event, said Ben Warner, JCCI deputy director.

“The fundamental questions are: What kind of city do we want to be in 2020? What marks do we want to hit to be an economically successful great place to live?” Castro asked.

“One goal might be to create X-number of housing units downtown within the next 10 years. Another goal might be to reduce the teen pregnancy rate by X-percentage in the next 10 years. I’d like for us to set bold goals and then find out how we’re going to fund them,” the mayor said.

Castro said the city is promoting the event with e-mail blasts and target lists of about 1,000 people selected with the help of chambers of commerce.

Castro wants a final SA2020 plan written within six months.

Working committees will focus on economic development, transportation, energy, water, the arts and other areas, he said.

The tri-chairs for SA2020 are Rackspace Hosting Chairman Graham Weston, Silver Ventures Development Director Darryl Bird and lawyer Sonia Rodriguez. A steering committee is being organized.

Cisneros said SA2020 is one of the best things Castro can do as mayor.

“I think it was the best thing I did in the eight years I was (mayor), quite accidentally and unplanned and not knowing all the consequences,” Cisneros said. “When I look back on those years, and people ask me what I was the most proud of, it’s not the Rivercenter mall or the nuclear project or the Alamodome or the new airport terminals. It is the mechanisms we used to bring people together, and (Target ’90) was the primary one.”

Forming common vision

The concept for Target ’90 didn’t originate in San Antonio. It was patterned somewhat after Goals for Dallas, conducted in the 1960s under then-Dallas Mayor Erik Jonsson. One result there: D-FW International Airport.

Urban goals programs became popular in the 1980s, JCCI’s Warner said, but exploded in the 1990s as some cities set goals but did not coordinate them, causing problems for utilities, schools, housing and transportation. In the past decade, technology and the Internet has made urban goals programs even more effective, he explained.

Cisneros had campaigned for his second term as mayor in 1983 partly on the need for an urban goals plan. After the May election that year, Cisneros pulled together a lengthy workbook to start the planning process.

It turned out that some of the goals fell outside the city’s jurisdiction. They belonged instead to the school districts, business community and social organizations.

“My principal job was not to mobilize municipal resources. My job was not to put the city government in front of the parade,” he recalled. “It was to serve as a traffic cop who could channel all the energies of the civic forces in San Antonio and just make sure they were not going to collide and not work at cross-purposes but could move in the same current.”

Castro said SA2020 will be the same.

“You take an issue like education. There’s no question the city can assist with the education of our young people, but that is primarily a school district job,” Castro said.

Cisneros said he was fortunate to have strong leadership at hand to drive Target ’90.

“We had Bob Marbut, then running Harte-Hanks, to serve as chair. As co-chairs, we had Lou Nelle Sutton and Roy Kaiser, who had been a COPS leader and worked for the archdiocese. Then we developed 12 working committees. Each involved dozens of people,” he said.

Nelson Wolff, who had been a state representative and state senator from 1971 to 1975, succeeded Marbut as Target ’90 chairman in 1985 and 1986.

“The city became more unified because of Target ’90. It created a lot of excitement. It was a great experience to go through. SA2020 has the same opportunity. It is a more mature city now,” said Wolff, now Bexar County judge.

Target ’90 “joined 500 people in a common vision, 500 leaders in the community,” Cisneros said. “When it came later to support bond issues or support the Alamodome referendum, they were there as supporters because they were there at the beginning. I could not have known in advance that would happen.”

Wolff was one of the many leaders who emerged from Target ’90, winning election to the City Council and then becoming mayor from 1991 to 1995.

“I would have never done any of that” if not for Target ’90, Wolff said. “I had been out of politics for 10 years.”

Wolff plans to speak at the Saturday kickoff for SA2020.

Lila Cockrell, who served as mayor from 1975 to 1981 and again from 1989 to 1991, supported Target ’90 from her position between mayoral terms as executive director of United San Antonio. USA, as it was called, worked on various projects, such as helping obtain engineering degrees at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

“Target ’90 was a wonderful achievement of goal-making,” Cockrell said. “It focused people on opportunities, and leadership was more easily identified and developed.”

Cisneros said, “If you ask around town who was involved in Target ’90, it’s kind of a who’s who of the leadership that followed in the ’90s.”

Castro said he is counting on SA2020 to do the same.

“More importantly, SA2020 will develop a stronger sense of direction for San Antonio as a community. We’ve changed tremendously over the past 25 years, and yet as a community we have not come together to set a course for our future. It’s inevitable new leaders will emerge out of the process if we do it right,” Castro said.

Funding education, light rail

Castro has spent much time lately on education, and one of the hot-button items for SA2020 will be whether and how to raise the city’s sales tax by one-eighth of a cent to the legal cap of 8.25 percent.

Castro said he would like to see it spent on programs to improve kindergarten readiness, reduce the number of dropouts and increase the number of college graduates.

The sales tax increase could produce $25 million to $30 million a year and could be approved by voters in five-year increments. Castro hopes SA2020 will help lead to an appointed panel by early 2011 to produce detailed proposals for a vote, possibly in November 2012. Castro calls it the “brainpower initiative.”

Wolff said he will support Castro on the sales tax/education initiative, even though he earlier wanted the sales tax boost to fund light rail. Wolff now hopes a city bond issue, perhaps bolstered by a county bond issue, can finance light rail.

Wolff said only about $10 million of the $550 million city bond issue in 2007 went to downtown, where the first light rail or trolley system would cross on north-south and east-west routes.

New highway construction will halt after 2013, the county judge warned.

“We need to move people more efficiently and give them choices,” he said.

Char Miller, a longtime urban studies professor at Trinity University who moved to Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., three years ago, said Target ’90 didn’t envision the consequences of the growth it helped spark. The metropolitan area has grown to today’s population of about 1.4 million, up from about 800,000 in 1990.

“What is San Antonio going to look like physically in 2020? Where will people live? Where will the water come from? Unless we ask those types of questions, SA2020 could turn into an economic growth machine that doesn’t take into account the growth. That was the failure of the Cisneros vision. I hope it won’t be the failure of the Julián Castro vision,” Miller said.

Miller acknowledged Target ’90’s advances in education, but he said San Antonio doesn’t yet have all the pieces it needs for a global, knowledge-based economy.

Water supplies also should be a priority, said Miller, with Pomona’s environmental and analysis program.

“To ignore water in the American Southwest is to put yourself in deep jeopardy,” he said.

Technology and updated regulatory practices have combined to better protect the Edwards Aquifer, said Howard Peak, San Antonio mayor from 1997 to 2001. Land still exists in sensitive areas where development rights are grandfathered from certain restrictions.

“We should always be checking to see if the regulations are doing what they need to do,” Peak said. “I don’t want us resting on our laurels.”

At the same time, more downtown housing can slow the urban sprawl and accelerate the use of public transportation.

“We’re a whole lot closer to more downtown housing than ever,” said Peak, now with AT&T Inc. “With various policies and incentives, we may get a significant increase in residents downtown. That in turn would create a lot of other things that would be good for downtown and the city as a whole,” he said.

Opportunity missed

Peak was mayor when the city found itself without an appropriate mix of sports and entertainment after the 65,000-seat Alamodome opened in 1993 and HemisFair Arena was torn down.

The AT&T Center later was built by Bexar County on the Coliseum grounds on the East Side, but Peak still believes an intermediate-sized arena should be next to the Alamodome so they could “play off each other,” he said.

“We missed an opportunity to expand a component (sports/entertainment) to meet citizen needs and the needs of the events that come to the facilities, that serve the citizens and bring people from out of town,” Peak said.

Jim Dublin, chairman of the Texas Research and Technology Park, which was a result of Target ’90, remembers the civic energy the plan generated.

“People thought, ‘We could actually draft our future here,’. ” Dublin recalled. “You could approach these issues and talk about them openly. ..... We are at another time, and we have another good leader. Everyone has permission to think broadly. It’s like a giant brainstorming session. There’s never a bad idea.”

Target ’90 was successful in pulling people “away from their own silos, to cooperate and move forward,” said Richard Gambitta, director of the University of Texas at San Antonio Honors College Institute for Law and Public Affairs.

The global economy puts more emphasis on education than it did in 1990, Gambitta said. But he cited the 16 “silos” of education, or Bexar County school districts. “There needs to be some discussion about that,” Gambitta said. Also, the role of a Tier One university, to which UTSA aspires, also needs to be addressed.

Work force emphasis

Some organizations opposed various Target ’90 goals. Communities Organized for Public Service fought the Alamodome, for example, because it diverted tax revenues away from more important needs, said Andy Sarabia, COPS’ first and founding president.

SA2020’s top priority should be work force development, including “adults failed by the education system,” he said.

He said he believes cities will survive and prosper only if they invest in their work force. San Antonio has a large work force, he said, but it needs higher skill levels.

South Side residents complained during Target ’90 that their neighborhoods had been ignored for decades.

“They were right,” said Cindy Taylor, South San Antonio Chamber of Commerce president. Public transportation services have fallen behind for the South Side, especially with Toyota’s assembly plant in operation and Texas A&M University at San Antonio under construction. The branch is expected to enroll 30,000 students eventually, Taylor said.

“We’ve earned the right not to be ignored anymore,” said Taylor, who has been invited to the SA2020 steering committee. “We know how we want to grow. We’re going to be all over it. I’m going to give it all I got.”

If a path to leadership or helping shape San Antonio’s future are not enough to motivate some San Antonians to become involved in SA2020, other possibilities can be considered — even romance.

Love flickered during Target ’90. Wolff met his wife, Tracy, because she was Target ’90’s program director.

“There were positive and unintended consequences,” Cisneros said with a laugh.